


A Feeling Called Hope

by Calacious



Series: Comfort in November and December 2020 [17]
Category: Tour of Duty (1987)
Genre: AU: Post Canon, AU:Altered Canon Events, Comfortember 2020, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Love, M/M, Some angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:01:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27809518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calacious/pseuds/Calacious
Summary: An excerpt: “Family,” Myron says, swallowing, and biting his lip. Zeke pulls him in for a hug, and that’s when Myron feels like he can finally breathe, like they’re safe, like they really did make it out of Vietnam, he’d been half-convinced it had all been a dream.
Relationships: Zeke Anderson/Myron Goldman
Series: Comfort in November and December 2020 [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1996825
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4
Collections: Comfortember 2020





	A Feeling Called Hope

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the comfortember prompt: hot cocoa
> 
> My wheel of decision landed on Tour of Duty, and I thought that I should give it another spin, then this idea took hold. This is not perfect, and it is definitely not taking into consideration canon events, or issues that people would have with homosexuality in the 70s. This is fluff.

They’re a long way from home, and there’s no snow, just rain. It’s hot, humid, and the stench of mold and sweaty men does nothing to remind them that back home it’s winter, and there’s snow and ice skating, sledding, snowmen, and snowball fights. The weather is cooler, and things are much less chaotic.

“Here,” Zeke interrupts Myron’s downward spiral of thoughts, plunks a cup of what Myron assumes is bitter coffee that’s spent too much time in the pot before being poured into his cup, in front of him. 

He sits down on Myron’s recently abandoned cot, and rests his arms on his knees. There’s a sparkle to his eyes that Myron’s come to recognize means mischief of somesort. 

Myron grimaces, and pushes the cup away, not ready to greet the new day. It’s bound to be a shitty one, just like the last, and all the other days before it, if the sound of rain pounding away on the top of his hooch is anything to go by. Zeke nudges the mug toward him, and Myron grudgingly wraps his hands around it.

The mug is warm, and it reminds Myron of when he was little, when his mom was still alive and she’d sit him down for tea parties (of which his dad was never invited to, and which Myron was sworn to never tell about). They’d have freshly baked scones and tea with a touch of milk and honey. 

He knows that there isn’t tea in the mug. This war’s too good for tea, and he would rather not have a good memory of just him and his mother tainted by it. 

“What’s in the mug?” he asks. 

“Take a sip and find out,” Zeke challenges. “Mind you don’t burn your tongue. It’s hot, and I made it special for you, so you’d best drink it while it’s still hot.”

With a sense of trepidation that he knows is unfounded (Zeke’s never steered him wrong in and out of the field), Myron lifts the mug to his lips, and takes a tentative sip of the hot liquid and burns his tongue. Zeke shakes his head. 

“Told you to be careful,” he says. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Myron grouses, but he smiles as he lifts the mug again to take another sip. Mindful of the warning, and his burnt tongue, he blows on the warm liquid first, cooling it a little, before drinking.

Far from bitter, it’s sweet, and smooth as it glides across his tongue, waking taste buds that had anticipated something much different. The taste of good chocolate has become so foreign to him that he’s not sure how to process it, and he wants to pinch himself to be sure that he’s not dreaming.

“Where’d you get this?” Myron asks as he takes another drink of the hot chocolate, savoring it on his tongue before swallowing. 

“Katie sent it to me, along with a letter insisting that I share it with you,” he says. There’s a goofy smile on his face, and Myron’s heart beats a little faster. 

“She did?” he asks, not sure how much Zeke has told Katie and his ex about him, about them and what they mean to each other. It’s tricky, and it’s not particularly safe, but to Myron, it’s everything, and the only good thing to come out of this war for him.

“She wanted to make you smile,” he says. “Looks like it worked.”

Myron finishes the last of the hot chocolate, relishing every last drop of it, and then he turns to Zeke. “Come here, he says.”

Eyes sparkling, Zeke complies, and Myron pulls him into a kiss that leaves both of them breathless, and leaning against each other for support. 

“That’s some mighty powerful hot chocolate,” Zeke says, chuckling. He gives Myron another kiss, and then they pull apart.

“You’ll let her know that it made me smile?” Myron asks, already knowing the answer.

Zeke nods. “She wants to meet you.”

“Is her mom going to be okay with that?” Myron asks, nervous at both the prospect of meeting Zeke’s little girl, and being denied the ability to do so.

“Yeah,” he says, sighing. He runs a hand through his hair, and Myron knows that Zeke’s not going to tell him everything that happened between him and his ex during his last visit stateside. “Yeah, she’s going to be okay with it.”

“I can’t wait to meet your Katie,” Myron says. Though he’s nervous as hell about it, he’s eager to see the little girl that Zeke had a part in making. He’s seen pictures of her, heard stories about the little girl, and has listened aptly as Zeke’s read her letters aloud to him. 

“She can’t wait to meet you,” he says. 

“We’ll have tea parties with scones and milk tea with honey,” Myron says, and he punches Zeke in the arm when the older man gives him a look. 

“It’s something I did with my mother,” Myron confesses. “It’s one of the good memories.”

“Katie will love it,” Zeke says. “Just two months and change, and we’ll be home.”

“Two months and change,” Myron repeats. He doesn’t voice any of the worries that he has, or mention the almost daily nightmares he has about not making it home. 

It’s exactly two months, seven days, thirteen and a half hours when he and Zeke step out of the airport terminal in Boise, Idaho. There’s a fine dusting of snow on the ground, and the air is crisp and cold. Myron pulls his coat tighter around him, and leans into Zeke when the other man wraps an arm around his shoulder.

“Careful now, watch your step,” Zeke says. 

There are no landmines, no trip wires, no booby traps that they need to stay clear of, but the sidewalk is slippery, and Myron almost falls flat on his face a few steps into their walk to where Carol waits for them. Little Katie’s in the backseat of the car, waving at them, and Myron can’t stop the smile that the sight of Zeke’s little girl, so eager to greet her daddy on his way home from the war, conjures in him.

“We did it,” Myron says. “We made it home.”

“Ready to have that tea party?” Zeke asks as he opens the trunk and slings their bags into it.

Truth be told, he’s a little nervous about it all. He may have faced certain death while in Vietnam, and lived to tell about it, but it’s nothing in comparison to facing Zeke’s little girl and hoping that she will like him.

“Yeah,” he says, squaring his shoulders, and lying through his teeth.

Zeke chuckles, and shakes his head. He pulls Myron in for a quick kiss, and then whispers, “Relax, soldier, she’s not going to hate you.”

“I...”

“Daddy,” Katie calls from the backseat. “Are you going to introduce me to Mr. Myron or not? Hurry up, I want to meet him.”

Myron blushes, and swallows nervously as Zeke takes his hand, and leads him to the car. They both settle into the back with Katie, and Carol doesn’t bat an eye at it. She nods at the two of them, and with a, “Welcome home,” she starts driving. 

Katie chatters away with her dad, and Myron is drawn into the easy conversation. When they reach the home that Zeke bought for them on his last visit stateside before he started his last tour, Myron’s agreed to a tea party next Sunday afternoon, and Katie’s insisting on a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“See,” Zeke says as the car pulls away, Katie waving at the both of them. “She loves you, just like I told you she would.”

“She’s amazing,” Myron says. 

He’s already planning their tea party, making a mental list of what they’ll need to pick up from the grocery store, what he’ll need to make sure they have available in the kitchen, the equipment they’ll need, tea cups, saucers, a teapot, because loose leaf tea is far better for tea parties than the kind that comes packaged in little bags. Half of the fun of tea parties with his mother was the time he’d spent in the kitchen with her, helping out with the baking of the scones, and other tasty treats. And though he’s just met Katie, he wants to do that with her, too.

“...family,” Zeke says, and Myron gets the feeling that he’s missed the first half of what Zeke has said.

“What’s that?” he asks, following Zeke into their home, and smiling when he sees that it’s been decorated with a banner that says, Welcome Home, and there are little homey touches that Carol and Katie must have added to the place before they’d arrived.

“I said, Katie loves you because you’re family,” Zeke says it like it’s fact, and Myron’s heart skips a beat, because after his mom, he hadn’t known family. His father had been more military man, drill sergeant than father.

“Family,” Myron says, swallowing, and biting his lip. Zeke pulls him in for a hug, and that’s when Myron feels like he can finally breathe, like they’re safe, like they really did make it out of Vietnam, he’d been half-convinced it had all been a dream. 

“Family,” Zeke repeats. It’s more than Myron hoped to have when he’d started his first tour in Vietnam. Hell, he’d thought he’d die over there. If it hadn’t been for Zeke, he would have. 

“Now, you stop that,” Zeke says, pulling him further into the house, toward the bedroom.

“What?” Myron asks, a little defensively.

“Stop brooding,” Zeke says. “We have a brand new bed, in a brand new house, a shower that has hot water and no one else we need to share it with, we are home, and I won’t have you thinking about that place and what could have been.”

Myron frowns, but he doesn’t resist when Zeke strips him of his clothes, letting them fall to the floor in a pool at their feet. They hadn’t been able to take the time to really get to know each other, to look their fill. They take that time now, mapping each other’s bodies with their hands, taking their time to drink in each dip and divot.

After they’ve had their fill of each other, they take a long, luxurious shower, and Myron finds his fingers itching for a cigarette. He finds that, for Zeke, and Katie’s sake, he doesn’t want to give into the urge to smoke. It’s a strange feeling that’s settled itself right inside his chest, one that he hasn’t felt in a really long time. Hope.


End file.
